CS:GO Movement Guide

Today we learn about movement inside of Counter-Strike. Time to die, terrorist scum! Greetings, I, TheWarOwl greets you. Today we’re going to be talking about a very important topic inside of Counter-Strike and that is movement. How the movement works, and how to apply it in game is probably the single most technically difficult thing that you’re going to be doing. It’s something that takes hours and hours of practice to get right. That’s something that you need to understand to even play the game, but you need to master in order to take your game to the next level – It’s what separates good players from not-so-good players. If you’re coming from other shooters this may be a very foreign concept – in Overwatch for example, there is no movement inaccuracy, and when you press the buttons to move your character, it actually affects their velocity, not their acceleration like it does in Counter-Strike, so it’s like instantaneous movements.

For other games that are more similar to Counter-Strike in the movement, the other controls tend to be more clunky than Counter-Strike which makes it very unique to Counter-Strike. Movement in Counter-Strike is one of the most uniquely Counter-Strikey things that there is. What the movement variables should be is also the single most controversial topic in Global Offensive in particular. We see people post their ideal values all the time. Lots of tests have been ran. Valve does read those and has responded to them, and has changed the movement slightly over the years, so how the movement worked four years ago, at least the variables, is different than how it is now.

So instead of talking about what we think the movement should be, let’s look at what the movement is and how we can use that to own some noobs. There are a number of different factors that affect your accuracy in Counter-Strike. There’s the natural imprecision of the weapons, there’s the inaccuracy caused by shooting called recoil, and then there’s the movement inaccuracy which is the topic of this video. The faster you’re moving, the more inaccurate you are going to be. If you move below a certain speed, your shots will be accurate.

You want to shoot when you’re in this threshold. So how do you get there? Well, you could just stand there like a socially awkward dummy at a party (or me my entire life), but that makes you a massive target (and a massive target for bullying). Movement in Counter-Strike is all about striking the perfect balance between being accurate when shooting and being difficult to hit. We have a lot of tools to do this. The worst thing you can do is just outright run at your opponent, you’ve made yourself inaccurate, and you’re going to be in the same spot in his vision. It’s quite possibly the dumbest thing you can do, but still something I see horrifyingly often in Matchmaking Academy demos for lower ranked players. Strafing is the tool you’ll use the most – “A” and “D” on your keyboard, moving to the side.

It makes you a really difficult target to hit, and you can shoot accurately when you either stop or change directions. So if I’m strafing left, and I want to stop to shoot some enemies, I can press “D” to stop faster. This is called “Counter-Strafing”. Using it over and over again predictably is something we’ve pejoratively termed “ADAD”. I take full responsibility for everyone doing this with my sidestep shooting tutorial from 2012, that has million views. This was early on when we were just learning Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and the movement values allowed you to horribly abuse this.

So does counter-strafing versus just letting your character stop naturally slow your character down faster? “Yes, it does. Pressing the movement buttons creates acceleration so you are accelerating in the opposite direction of velocity so it slows you down faster.” Movement inaccuracy exists on its own separate from shooting inaccuracy. If you stand still and spray, you can memorize the recoil pattern and then control for it. You can do the same thing while moving! When your movement inaccuracy is high, there’s no way to predict where the rounds will be going, but when it gets low, it’ll be the same, as if you were standing still the entire time, no matter where you are in the spray.

This means you can spray while ADAD and still get accurate shots when you change directions, as long as you’re controlling for recoil the entire time. If you ADAD very fast, it’ll almost be like you’ll never experience movement inaccuracy at all. Doing this will help you avoid getting one tapped by aim players, while also being able to shoot accurately yourself. You can begin to see how Counter-Strike is more than just tapping heads. The vast majority of engagements in Counter-Strike however, don’t happen when you’re in the open, so ADAD just isn’t going to cut it – you’re going to have to learn some techniques. Most engagements are going to happen when you’re at a corner. You can counter-strafe a corner to peek your opponent to see what’s going on without getting shot.

You can also use this the shoulder-peek your opponent. This is when you don’t actually look around the corner, you just strafe close enough to it that your shoulder is visible to the enemy. You can use this to bait out an enemy AWP-shot and then repeek the corner and gain an advantage. Counter-strafing a corner can also be used to pre-shoot positions while keeping yourself safe. If you just step out into the open, and you miss your shot, you’re a massive target. You’re gonna die. If you counter-strafe it, you have a much higher chance of getting away safely. This takes a ton of practice. You’ll have to strafe corners over and over again and make sure you shoot at the common enemy positions. This is something to do on your own time at a private server.

Another really annoying technique we see is counter-strafing corners and shooting every time you do it. Something we call “jiggle-peeking”. The opponent really has to be either freakishly fast to hit you or time your movements and predict when you’re going to peek. If you’re really smart you can erratically change up the pattern of how you peek an angle. To be the most difficult target to hit you need to be the most unpredictable target. Most players get into a predictable pattern of movement. After learning the basic mechanics try and break away from this and develop your own style of movement. Because many players expect people to peek this way you can also catch your opponent’s off-guard by wide-peeking which is strafing out into the room away from the corner and directly engaging your opponent.

This works best when the enemy doesn’t have their own cover to escape behind and you know where they are. It’s a power move. It’s also great when you think you’ve effectively flashed the opponent. It’s a way to take a position. When flashed some players will spam the close angle, assuming you’re going to peek. If you wide-peek you’re going to avoid that. This kind of movement isn’t just for the attackers. Defenders will want to stay at a corner and use the same techniques on their opponent. There is a huge peekers advantage inside of Counter-Strike and most combat in Counter-Strike is going to happen this way. So that’s strafing the most common technique that you should already be using and you’re going to use every single time you engage an opponent. Now let’s talk about crouching. Press “control” to crouch. Like the tutorial section at the start of a game you know where it tells you what buttons to press, anyway, please don’t set crouch to “toggle” in Counter-Strike.

That’s dumb. You’ll need to be able to very quickly control your crouching. This is a skill-based game guys this ain’t Call of Duty I often see people ask me about the accuracy benefits of crouching. In my opinion the lack of mobility that crouching gives you far outweighs the accuracy benefit. At most distances your gun is precise enough. You’ll want to strafe-shoot! Crouching should be used to trick your opponent. Good players go for headshots. If you crouch the enemy won’t get the headshot, it’ll whiz over your head. You can crouch very close to corners to make your head a difficult target to hit. Keep in mind: They can still headshot you through the corner itself but it is worth it when holding certain long distances. You can also incorporate crouching into your peeking. If you strafe to peek and then you crouch as you do so, you’ll slide out into the open and get a chance to kill your opponent. I personally tend to do this when repeeking with the AWP. If I shoot an enemy with the AWP the enemy now knows where I am so if I want to quickly repeek, I duck peek.

Their crosshair is usually going to be at head level where I am. It’s a dumb idea to just walk out there. If I crouch-peek they have to move their crosshair down and in that time I get one accurate shot which of course is perfect if you’re going to be AWPing. Because you only need one… You only need that one perfect shot to take them down.

Crouching can also be used to get around the map using crouch jump Certain positions require the player to pull their goofy legs up under them as they jump. Remember: If you shift walk and crouch jump up to a higher elevation, you won’t make a sound. You will make a sound if you go from a higher elevation to a lower elevation though in any case. Oh, yeah, it is a movement tutorial. We got to talk about walking. I’m sure this is all repetitive information, but if you hold “shift”, you’ll walk and you don’t make a sound. This is highly, highly, highly important inside of Counter-strike, so you don’t give your position away. Here’s a little quick tip: If you see your teammate walking, please also walk! He’s walking for a reason. You have no idea how annoying it is to walk all the way to a position only to have all your efforts ruined by a doofus of a teammate clumping up behind you! Walk-peeking an angle is very dangerous because you’re a massive target. If someone is holding that angle you have a very low likelihood of living but you can walk-peek an angle in certain situations to abuse perspective.

Check out my perspective tutorial as a prerequisite. If an enemy is close to an angle, you can walk peek far from the angle, allowing you to see your opponent while they can’t see you or at least see them first. Killing them while doing this will make them rage harder than… me during a subscriber game on my Twitch stream. The last movement technique we have to talk about is jumping. How nuanced jumping is. Normally jumping is really stupid because you make yourself inaccurate, immobile and predictable. Jumping during combat will most definitely get you killed. However, there are ways you can use complicated jumping techniques to your advantage. In Counter-strike, you can strafe in mid-air.

You can control your flight using your mouse pointing it in the direction you’re facing so that your strafe makes you go in a circular motion. This is called “air-strafing”. It’s not very pronounced in Global Offensive, but it still is pretty useful. When escaping an enemy, you can air-strafe around a corner, It makes you a difficult target to hit and you don’t lose any speed. If your character is in the air the friction of the ground can’t slow him down, so you’re going to be going at the same speed you were when you jumped.

If you jump at just the right moment your character hits the ground, the friction doesn’t have a chance to slow him down, so you can preserve your momentum. This is called “Bunnyhopping”. Bunnyhopping is an entire topic on its own, so we’re not gonna be covering it fully, but it is useful if you can do it reliably. It’s not easy though. Another useful technique for jumping is to jump up to a higher elevation and then shoot as soon as you hit the ground. You can do this with a duck jump. When you hit the ground you’ll get an accurate shot so it’s a little bit tough to deal with because it’s hard to hit a player when they’re jumping.

There are very specific angles where you can peek while doing this as well, which is incredibly difficult to deal with if you’re on the receiving end because you don’t expect it. All of a sudden someone is going to be peeking and shooting immediately from a strange position. When thinking about movements inside of Counter-Strike don’t think about how a human walks around in the real world. A video game movement isn’t even close to the complexity of real-world-movements. In fact we have difficulty simulating real-world-movement at all with computers. You have to abstract what you see going on in the screen into what’s actually going on inside of the code. Decompile the false reality with your mind. With enough practice you’ll develop a feel for the movements inside of the games. It’s very jarring for new players, It’s like learning a new language. Be patient, your brain is amazing! It will adapt if you train it properly. And as always: I’m TheWarOwl and I still have no closer. Why is this recording? I didn’t s…